John was seated on a kitchen chair, gasping for breath, hands shaking. Elspeth had her arms around him.
‘What is it?’ Patrick said.
John waved speechlessly in the direction of the door to the outside and then had the unusual experience of having his son go down on his knees before him.
‘Dad,’ Patrick said softly, enveloping John’s hands in his own, ‘calm down. You’ll do your new ticker arrangements no end of harm. What’s happened?’
John panted, ‘It looks as though someone’s driven a tractor into the drive … and then through the hedge into the churchyard. The new shrubs … the fence … all your mother’s work planting bulbs. A lot of it … utterly ruined. Who could … do such a thing to us? I think there’s … damage to the graves too …’
Still kneeling, Patrick said, ‘I’ll have the garden fixed. Today. Please don’t upset yourself.’
Then proceed to track down the perpetrator before hanging, drawing and quartering them at the nearest crossroads, I thought grimly.
Patrick went out to have a look, came back directly and hurried upstairs to get dressed. Donning boots he then returned to the garden to fully assess the damage and was gone for such a long time that I threw away his tea as it had gone cold.
Elspeth, fearful for John as he was shivering uncontrollably, had persuaded him to get back into bed and phoned the doctor. All I could do was have a quick shower and get dressed then make myself useful by staying around in case Elspeth needed me and lay the pine kitchen table for breakfast.
Then I heard a police siren, realized Patrick had called out the cavalry and went outside.
The devastation about three-quarters of the way down the rectory drive was appalling, a huge swathe of damage cut through turf, border, new hedging and post-and-rail fence. Whatever had done it – the gap was wider than the small tractors that the local farmers used to negotiate the neighbourhood’s narrow lanes and gateways – had carried on into the churchyard, knocking over gravestones, breaking a branch off a tree, even scattering the flowers covering a new grave, ploughing them into the torn ground. There was a large pile of earth over on the far side and that was where several people were clustered.
I noted in passing as I walked round and entered the churchyard by the lychgate, which was roofed and totally impassable to vehicles, that the tracks of the digger, or whatever it had been, which had caused the damage suggested it had also exited through the rectory garden.
‘The headstone’s over there,’ I heard Patrick say, pointing, as I approached the group.
The damage was even worse than it had appeared when viewed from the adjacent driveway. Everything impeding whatever had gone on here had been ruthlessly smashed out of the way. Even a little row of what I knew to be babies’ graves had been bulldozed flat.
There was also a large hole in the ground.
‘It’s an exhumation,’ Patrick said to me.
‘What, you mean someone’s actually dug up and stolen a coffin?’ I exclaimed.
‘Barney Stonelake’s, no less,’ Carrick murmured. ‘That’s not to say we won’t find it dumped just down the road somewhere.’
I said, ‘So whoever it was gained entry through the rectory drive because they failed to knock down the churchyard wall?’
‘You’re probably right, Ingrid,’ Carrick said. ‘Yes, that would explain it. Why would anyone want to desecrate the grave of that poor old man? A grudge against his son?’
‘There was the chap whom he sacked because he thought he was stealing diesel,’ Patrick pointed out. ‘Shaun Brown.’
Frowning into the hole, the DCI said, ‘There’s a list, I assure you, of folk Brian Stonelake’s upset, assaulted, sacked, short-changed and almost certainly stolen from over the years. It’s disgusting, though. The people who do things like this are filth.’
‘I called you because I think there might be a connection with our current investigations, including the murders. There has to be: everything going on round here has Stonelake written all over it.’ Patrick gestured angrily in the direction of the upended headstone.
‘There could well be a connection,’ Carrick agreed. ‘Or is it vandalism, pure and simple?’
Normally, I knew, we would not have so closely approached what was, of course, a crime scene for fear of destroying valuable evidence, footprints and so forth. But the despoiler had done his work well, seemingly obliterating any possible incriminating traces by scraping up the turf surrounding the excavation into a small pile and then driving over it.
‘Is there much damage at your parents’ place?’ Carrick asked Patrick.
‘It’s quite bad,’ Patrick answered. ‘The new borders were only finished last week. If you’d be good enough to have SOCO take pictures I’d like to arrange to have it put right, today if possible. My father’s pretty cut up about it.’
‘There’s nothing to stop you having it put right today even if I don’t think it serious enough to call in SOCO – but you might invalidate any insurance claim.’
‘Bugger insurance,’ Patrick said quietly.
Shortly afterwards Patrick and Carrick departed in the latter’s car and the house went quiet. I had thought I would work on the screenplay but found myself unable to concentrate on it. All I could see in my mind’s eye were those three ghastly still figures hanging in the barn. Later again, the doctor having come and gone, I made sandwiches for everyone’s lunch. John was all right but had orders to rest for the remainder of the day: apparently he had run full tilt down the drive with the bad news, not yet recommended. Then, at just after three, I asked Elspeth if I could use the phone and rang Patrick. I had had an idea.
‘Gillard,’ said that well-remembered voice.
‘What’s happening?’
‘James and I are just outside Shepton Mallet at a roadside cafe having a well-earned mug of tea and a bun. Someone’s found the coffin.’
‘Really? Where?’
‘In a ditch. It’s empty, though – there’s no body.’
‘That’s ghastly!’
‘We’re on our way back to the nick now. D’you want to drive into Bath?’
You bet I did.
We arrived almost together, the men mounting the steps at the rear entrance as I was cruising around looking for a parking space. Carrick waved me to a slot nearby with someone’s initials painted on it, explaining afterwards that whoever it was was on leave.
‘A woman walking her dog on the outskirts of Oakhill found the coffin,’ he said to me when we were seated in his office. ‘She immediately rang the police as it obviously wasn’t a new one that had fallen off a lorry delivering stuff to an undertaker.’
‘Surely someone didn’t drive a JCB all the way from Hinton Littlemoor to Oakhill in the middle of the night with a coffin in the bucket!’ I said, or rather, hooted.
Patrick said, ‘No, a van or pickup must have been involved as well. Plus a couple more blokes, of course.’
I was finding this all too fantastic. ‘But that must have made the whole exercise even more expensive. Just to get even with Brian Stonelake? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘And where is poor old Barney?’ Carrick said.
‘Perhaps something valuable had been hidden in with the corpse,’ I suggested.
‘Your loot theory,’ Carrick said dubiously. ‘Well, it has to be borne in mind for, as you say, digging up the churchyard wasn’t cheap. Unless someone really hates Stonelake.’
‘Have you had any unidentified human remains found in the area?’ I asked. ‘I mean, there’s always the thought that Barney was never buried at all.’
‘Ingrid, that would mean that undertakers were in on the scam and Uncle Tom Cobley and all,’ the DCI retorted, his Scottish accent more pronounced than usual.
To Patrick, I said, ‘I’ve been thinking and have a proposal to make. You and I have worked together for several years now and I think we make a good team. I think I’ve something to contribute now and if you’ll have me I intend to apply to
join the scheme. They may not want me and of course I’ll have to go through the selection process but—’ I broke off because Patrick was smiling at me.
‘Brinkley asked me if you’d be interested,’ he said. ‘Even if it was only on a consultancy basis. In other words if I ran out of ideas I’d get on the blower to the oracle.’
I found myself under Carrick’s frosty blue gaze.
‘Before we discuss this further I have to tell you that I had a complaint,’ he said. ‘From a Mr William Brandon, who lives at the mill. Remember him?’
‘Of course,’ I replied.
‘He told me that a woman who had been described to him as Patrick’s training adviser made offensive remarks to him during an interview at his home. Is that correct?’
‘No, what I said to him wasn’t offensive and it wasn’t during the interview. I told him to fix his sick wife some lunch.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes.’
‘You took a dislike to this man?’
‘He’s like something you haul out of a long-blocked drain.’
‘Ingrid, you can’t behave like that, however you feel. I had to apologize and I think you ought to go round there and do the same. If you’re going to be involved with law enforcement you must learn that there are rules of behaviour.’
‘I understand,’ I said.
Carrick turned his attention to Patrick. ‘And you’re still behaving as though you’re working for MI5. Ingrid isn’t your training adviser. You simply can’t lie and con your way through this job. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a hundred times – it’s more accountable than what you’re used to.’
Quietly, Patrick said, ‘Ingrid is my training adviser and since we got back together again after being divorced for a while some years ago – she slung me out because I was turning, no, had turned, into a supercilious prig – she’s the only reason I’ve recovered and become a half-decent person after being blown up in the Falklands. One of her bad faults though is that she gets very shirty if she thinks anyone or anything is being neglected, in this case, Mrs Brandon. I wasn’t present when the remarks were made but I’ll try to keep her under control in future.’ Into the silence which followed this he said, ‘Does this mean you’re against what Ingrid is suggesting?’
Predictably, Carrick now looked embarrassed. ‘No, not at all,’ he said. ‘OK. It’s actually a good idea and I’m happy to have her along on condition that you both bear in mind what I’ve just said. But I insist that she doesn’t get involved in any potentially nasty situations.’
So he still needed me as a buffer but it would be difficult to explain to higher authority if I got the smallest bit dented.
Patrick said, ‘I shall have to clear it with Brinkley. If it’s all right with you I’ll endeavour to do it now.’
This he did and permission came with the same proviso; I was to learn, assist and advise where appropriate – something Brinkley assumed, wrongly, had been my only role with MI5 – and not on any account get mixed up in anything dangerous or in which firearms were involved.
Patrick obviously had not told anyone that I was a real whizz with a sub-machine gun.
‘You didn’t ask me if I was interested in helping you,’ I said to Patrick when we were alone.
He feigned shock. ‘I thought you went and beat James to a pulp because he hadn’t called me out.’
‘Thank you for the lovely things you said just now.’
‘It’s true, though, isn’t it?’
It looked as though I was in. Ye gods, what had I done?
Patrick got out of the car and stretched luxuriously. We had left James at the nick and driven back to Hinton Littlemoor ostensibly on the case of thefts of horse tack and trailers but actually to talk to the residents about the Manleys and Keith Davies. I was quite surprised that Carrick himself had not suggested it, Patrick supposed to be off the case notwithstanding, as someone with family connections in the village was likely to get better results than an outsider.
‘We know none of them were churchgoers so that rules out quite a few possible sources,’ I said. ‘They must have gone in the pub though surely.’
‘Almost certainly. I suggest we leave that until later, concentrate on the village shop before it closes and then talk to people who don’t tend to go in pubs.’
I already knew that the members of the walking group who had found the bodies were not from the immediate locality but from Bath U3A and had already been questioned. Nothing they had said had provided any leads. The shop cum post office might be more fruitful. It was run as a cooperative by volunteers, the result of a ‘buy-out’ by local people when it had looked as though the village would be left without a shop at all when the previous owners retired.
It was to be expected though that recent events would have left everyone subdued and this was the impression I received after we had entered, the conversation among the three or four people present muted and strictly to do with the business in hand. There was a good range of health and organic foods but I have a notion that folk who have suffered personal trauma do not necessarily feel better for munching on pumpkin seeds. I chose some chocolate ginger for John and a box of crystallized fruit for Elspeth.
There was no one being served at the post-office counter, behind which stood Norman, an employee of that organization and not part of the cooperative. He was one of the church wardens and although only in his early fifties possessed the gravitas of a much older man. It amuses Patrick that Norman and his wife Brenda always treat him as though he is still in short trousers.
‘How is your father?’ Norman asked him. ‘Such a dreadful thing to happen.’
‘Fine, thank you,’ Patrick answered. ‘No damage done at all.’
‘I hear you’re a policeman now. No doubt you’re investigating the vandalism.’
Perhaps it was not general knowledge yet that a coffin had been stolen.
‘No, not really,’ Patrick told him. ‘I’m after information about the Manleys and Keith Davies – the murder victims.’
I approached the shop counter to pay for the sweets but it was close to where the men were talking so I could hear what was being said.
‘Outsiders,’ Norman said dismissively. ‘Brought their own nemesis with them from the city, no doubt. Folk round here are more interested in catching those who ruined our lovely churchyard.’
‘Well, the dead might have been disturbed a bit but these people you so lightly dismiss as being of no account were living and breathing when someone slashed their throats for them,’ Patrick said, not bothering to lower his voice. ‘Did they come in here? Buy stamps? Post parcels? If so, where to? Did you bother to pass the time of day with any of them? Ask them how they were? Whether they’d settled in all right and were enjoying living in the country?’
There was rather a heavy silence and the young woman who was handing me my change gave me a thumbs-up sign, eyeing Norman with distaste.
‘I never meant they were of no account!’ the man exclaimed resentfully.
‘Think,’ Patrick went on inexorably. ‘Did they use this post office?’
‘Yes – well – yes, I seem to remember the woman did,’ Norman blustered. ‘But I didn’t know their names. I was never given a credit card or anything like that. Just stamps I think she bought. No parcels. I never saw her husband or whoever he was.’
‘And the younger man?’
‘He might have been the one who asked if he could renew his tax disc here. Yes, I’m fairly sure it was him from the pictures in the paper – horrible pictures that you know were taken of the bodies. But I said no, he’d have to go to Bath. He looked at me in the most unpleasant way and then shouldered his way out.’
The woman serving behind the shop counter spoke, but not to Patrick, to another woman searching through a rack of birthday cards. ‘Didn’t your Tina go out with that chap, Doris?’
The woman bridled. ‘She did not! She met him for a drink in the Ring O’Bells on a couple of occasions
, that’s all. Not her sort at all, I assure you. She soon broke that off.’
Patrick regarded her with gentle gaze. ‘Where might I find Tina?’
‘My daughter had nothing to do with that man!’ shrilled her mother.
‘No, but he might have mentioned the names of a few of his friends.’ When there was a continuing silence Patrick added, ‘A little chat with me now might be preferable to one at the police station later.’
‘She’s at home,’ Doris said grudgingly. ‘Between jobs at the moment.’
She plonked the money down for the card she had chosen and stalked out.
Another woman peered around a revolving stand holding postcards of local views. ‘Has Tina ever worked?’ she ventured cautiously to no one in particular.
‘Left school with a GCSE in bullying and bunking off,’ said a younger voice and a girl came into view, carrying a pile of small boxes from a side room.
‘My daughter Sarah,’ Norman announced proudly. ‘She helps in here for an hour after she gets home from college. There’s nothing like encouraging a community spirit.’
Sarah had rather too close-together eyes to be attractive and a mouth that tended to purse disapprovingly like her father’s.
Patrick said, ‘Sarah, can you tell me anything about the Manleys or Keith Davies? Did you ever serve any of them? Did you ever see them with anyone else in the village?’
‘No,’ said Sarah with a shake of her head. ‘I think I once sold the woman some bread and a couple of other things. Not a chatty sort of person. Besides, I wouldn’t have anything in common with a woman like that.’
‘A woman like what?’ Patrick asked, clearly puzzled.
‘Well, you know … from the city. Living shut away from everyone in a posh flat.’
‘D’you know where Tina lives?’
‘In Rose Street – on the council estate. It’s the one with the plant things made out of old car tyres in the front garden.’
There was no mistaking the sneer on her face.
‘Remind me to write a novel set in a rural idyll,’ I said when we were back in the street.
Tina did not appear to have been warned of our imminent arrival so I could only assume that her mother had taken herself elsewhere.
Tainted Ground Page 8
